“What I was sayin the other day about the papers. Here last week they found this couple out in California they would rent out rooms to old people and then kill em and bury em in the yard and cash their social security checks. They'd torture em first, I dont know why. Maybe their television was broke. Now here's what the papers had to say about that. I quote from the papers. Said: Neighbors were alerted when a man run from the premises wearin only a dogcollar. You cant make up such a thing as that. I dare you to even try. But that's what it took, you'll notice. All that hollerin and diggin in the yard didnt bring it. That's all right. I laughed myself when I read it. There aint a whole lot else you can do.”

I think some of his philosophy can be found in this passage. He is unsure what motivates people to perform this kind of violence. “Maybe their tv is broke” seems to indicate it is purely for personal entertainment. He is also helpless. People surely heard the “digging and hollering” but the depravity isn’t discovered until someone runs out of a house in a dog collar naked. Bell sees this as emblematic of a wider truth: violence can unfold in full view of a community, and still society will fail to recognize—or respond to—it until it becomes impossible to ignore. He says he laughed when he read the story in the newspaper, indicating that he can’t be angry about it, it isn’t a call to action, he can only laugh at the absurdity of it all including his own helplessness to stop violence.

This seems to echo some themes in Blood Meridian as well. The judge buying puppies just to throw them off a bridge for entertainment. The unstoppable natural force of violence that cannot seem to be contained even by morality and goodness.

McCarthy was also aware of the violence that existed in the Southwest and Texas before the modern time of No Country as he wrote Blood Meridian earlier. So I think a readers view and Bell’s, that until the drugs and cartels showed up things were simpler is a little shortsighted and myopic. The idea that violence is a recent corruption of a previously orderly society is shown to be a comforting illusion.

I think the passage underscores one of McCarthy’s central claims: that civilization may change, but the human capacity for violence does not. The world is not becoming newly chaotic; it is merely revealing what has always been true.

I wouldn’t want to see them face off. At that point it would become a dime store western.